Supporting Debian machines for friends and family

Many Debian developers find themselves providing some form of technical support to friends and family. Achieving the mystical five nines is well beyond the means of an amateur sysadmin like myself, but giving my dad reliable boxes to use can be achieved without eating all of my free time.

This talk will draw on my experience supporting and maintaining my dad's Debian-based computers. I will briefly describe the hardware setup, introduce some useful packages and share some configuration hints. Areas of focus will include system updates, reliability, monitoring and security.